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Kin recognition and perceived facial similarity

Hansen, Florian; DeBruine, Lisa M.; Holzleitner, Iris J.; Lee, Anthony J.; O'Shea, Kieran J.; Fasolt, Vanessa

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Authors

Florian Hansen

Lisa M. DeBruine

Anthony J. Lee

Kieran J. O'Shea

Vanessa Fasolt



Abstract

Facial similarity between individuals informs kinship judgments in third-party kin recognition. Indeed, one study found that similarity and kinship judgments encapsulate the same information (Maloney & Dal Martello, 2006). Yet, another study found that this is not the case when comparing adult face pairs of different sex (DeBruine et al., 2009). We replicated these studies to further clarify the role of facial similarity in kin recognition. We recruited 318 raters, who were shown 50 sibling pairs and 50 age- and sex-matched unrelated pairs ranging from 3 to 17 years old. Each rater was randomly assigned to make either kinship judgments (“related” or “unrelated”) or similarity judgments (scale from 0 [not very similar] to 10 [very similar]). The threshold model found that performance in both tasks was equally accurate, with participants detecting child siblings in the kinship task above chance and giving significantly higher similarity ratings to siblings in the similarity task. In both tasks, opposite-sex siblings were perceived to be siblings less often than same-sex siblings, and judgments of unrelated face pairs were not affected by the sex of faces. Conversely, the effect of age difference within pairs of faces differed for the two tasks: a greater age difference decreased all kinship judgments, but only decreased similarity judgments of siblings, not unrelated pairs. In line with DeBruine et al. (2009), these findings suggest that similarity and kinship judgments are highly correlated but not strictly synonymous. The OSF Pre-registration Challenge for this project can be found at osf.io/ps9hy and the data at osf.io/sef9k.

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Apr 27, 2020
Publication Date 2020-06
Deposit Date Jun 11, 2021
Publicly Available Date Jun 11, 2021
Journal Journal of Vision
Electronic ISSN 1534-7362
Publisher Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 20
Issue 6
Article Number 18
DOI https://doi.org/10.1167/jov.20.6.18
Keywords allocentric kin recognition, face perception, similarity, resemblance
Public URL https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/7460857

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